The case against the Jewish State Part I: Israel's ethnocentric experiment

Israel's ethnocentric experiment

Israeli leaders are masters at muddling
the international community with trivial issues while
turning the peace negotiations into a temporising process
"to end all peace."

Assured by US subservient backing, and
for more than 15 years prior to current Sisyphean process,
Israel rejected Palestinian's peace overtures insisting on
impossible chameleon terms to be fulfilled even before
agreeing to talk with Palestine Liberation Organisation
(PLO). The first - which became later a US law - was to
renounce "terrorism" and recognise Israel without
reciprocity. The PLO submitted to the American demand to
start the current peace marathon in 1988.

After the
signing of the Oslo Accord between the PLO and the Labour
party government of Isaac Rabin, rightwing Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the Palestinian
recognition as incomplete insisting on the PLO to annul its
charter, specifically sections calling for establishing a
bi-national nonsectarian democratic state on all of
historical Palestine.

Again the PLO acquiesced and invited
then president Bill Clinton in December 1998 to christen a
meeting of the Palestine National Council annulling the
provisions demanded by the new Israeli government.

There
have been at least five internationally supervised peace
milestones and countless schemes negotiated directly between
the two parties in the last 20 years. Sequentially they
were: Oslo accord, Wye River agreement, Road Map, Annapolis
conference, Quartet Peace Plan... etc.

All were initiated
at the behest of various American administrations to allay
succeeding Israeli governments' "conditional approval" of
the preceding understanding. In fact, US secretary of state
John Kerry is leading fresh efforts to customise the 2002
Arab Peace initiative to suit Israel's reservations.

Out
of their magic tricks to throw off the international
community, the current Israeli Prime Minister conjured a new
condition demanding Palestinians to recognise Israel as an
ethnocentric Jewish state.

Keeping in mind, Israel does
not have a constitution defining its character or even an
official demarcated national borders.

To ascribe national
identity for a country is an internal matter. But to mandate
on Palestinians to recognise an ethnocentric character for
Israel is akin to asking the Pan African Congress to
recognise South Africa as a white nation during
apartheid.

Ethnocentrism was defined by William Graham
Summer, American professor of Sociology at Yale University
in 1906 "as having a view of things in which one's own group
is the centre of everything and the feeling that one's own
culture is better than all others."

Building on Summer's
earlier studies, psychologist Donald Campbell and his
associates described ethnocentrism in the late 60s and mid
70s "as a psychological construct," whereby the individual
propensity is "to identify strongly with her own in-group
and culture, the tendency to reject out-groups or the
tendency to view any economic, political, or social event
only from the point of the in-group."

Ethnocentrism is
typified by the in-group proclivity to uphold its own values
as being superior and the values of other cultures as
inferior. This develops into a groupthink collective
behaviour by members of the in-group rationalising the
demonisation and rejection of the out-groups.

Israel is a
classic ethnocentric example of the in-group vs. the
out-groups. In a 2012 survey, it was found that 59 per cent
of the Jewish in-group believed that Jews should be given
preference over non-Jewish natives in admission to jobs in
government ministries, and 49pc wanted the state to treat
Jews better than Palestinians.

Unlike Machiavellian
Israeli leaders, the late Knesset member Rabbi Meir Kahane
was more candid in articulating the ethnocentric state's
vision in his 1981 book They Must Go. He wrote that in a
"Jewish state," Arabs will suffer from discrimination. In
such case they will become alienated and antagonistic;
therefore the only sensible solution is to "get rid of
them."

"Get rid" of the out-group was an expensive
European experiment not taken seriously until it was too
late.

*************

Jamal Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) writes weekly
newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab
world issues. He is the author of “Children of
Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to
America. A version of this article was first published by
the Gulf Daily News
newspaper.

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